Author: Andrew Baird

Andrew Baird has recently returned from Taiwan as a guest of the Delta Electronics Foundation (Delta), the Taiwanese Coral Reef Society and the National Museum of Marine Science and Technology (NMMST). Delta fund the reef research project through NMMST with Dr Chao-Yang Kuo (CY) as the Principal Investigator. The aims of the trip were many, including testing the utility of Delta’s CT scanning technology for coral taxonomy and presenting a coral taxonomy workshop to colleagues of CY including Assistant Prof. Mei-Fang Lin (Mei-Fang) of the National Sun Yat-sen University and Prof Chaolun Allen Chen (Allen) of Academia Sinica (Fig. 1). CY had also hoped to broadcast live from underwater during the coral spawning that typically occurs in Wanghaixiang Chaojing Bay Resource Conservation Area, Keelung City, in July; however, Typhoon Gaemi meant that these plans were postponed until early August. Andrew also planned to image the holotypes of two nominal species that were originally described from specimens collected in Taiwan by Dr Ma in the 1950s which were thought to be stored at the Taiwan National Science Museum, Taichung.

The trip was mostly a success. The CT scans look very promising, with the potential to reveal phylogenetically informative morphological features that otherwise require painstaking thin-sectioning to be detected. This is certainly an area that warrants further research.

Andrew also succeeded in convincing Mei-Fang and Allen of the need to move beyond the Veron taxonomic framework and join Project Phoenix in their mission to reinvent coral taxonomy. In particular, Allen, Mei-Fang and CY will now focus on collecting topotypes for the 14 odd nominal species described on the basis of specimens collected in Taiwanese waters.

Of these 14 Taiwanese nominal species:

• Five are currently accepted, including the endemics Pseudosiderastrea formosa Pichon, Chuang & Chen, 2012 and Polycyathus chaishanensis Lin, Kitahara, Tachikawa, Keshavmurthy & Chen 2012
• Four are junior synonyms including Acropora sinensis (Brook 1893) a junior synonym of A. hyacinthus (Dana 1846) (soon to be removed from synonymy – watch this space)
• Five are of uncertain taxonomic status, including Montigyra taiwanica Ma & Kawaguti, 1959 and Moseleya minor Ma, 1959. If M. taiwanica is a good species, it is only the second time a specimen of this genus has ever been collected. Moseleya minor, with a type location in the Penghu Islands, is also a bit of a mystery, because Moseleya is not listed as occurring in Taiwan in the most recent check list of the coral fauna of Taiwan (Dai 2020).

Unfortunately, despite the help of Dr. Shih-Wei Wang, associate curator and the chair of Geology Department, Paleontology Division of the National Museum of Natural Science, Taichung, we could not find the holotypes at the museum.

Finally, after spending most of the week out of the water due to the typhoon we managed to get wet on the reefs off Kenting. Unfortunately, these reefs are in the midst of a moderately severe bleaching event. The bleaching was typically patchy, with some severely bleached species beginning to die (Fig. 2), but otherwise we estimate that mortality will be moderate. We also spotted one possible topotype of Montipora taiwanica (Fig. 3) and a number of potentially undescribed Acropora (Fig. 4) and Montipora species.

The food, as always in Taiwan, was wonderful (Fig. 5) and it was great for Andrew to be able to catch up with a number of James Cook University alumni throughout Taiwan including Prof. Kuo-Chang Colin Wen and Assistant Prof. Cheng-Han Tsai, as well a number of old friends including Assistant Prof. Sung-Yin Yang, Dr. Yuan-Chao Angelo Huang and Dr. Shashank Keshavmurthy.

We thank TJ of Delta Electronics Foundation, CY, Course Director Mr. Nenj-Jen Tsai of Dive New World Center, Dr. Wang and Dr Li-Shu Chen, the director of Industry-Academy Cooperation Division at the National Museum of Marine Science and Technology.

Literature cited

Dai CF (2020) Corals of Taiwan Vol. I: Scleractinia Fauna. Owl Books, Taipei, Taiwan